Looking through my files today, I am surprised that I don’t have more than a few views of the house. (These photographs were taken on July 16, 2005.) There is all sorts of awesomeness going on here, between the architecture of the house and the ruinishness of its present-day appearance. The Queen Anne style house features one dominant gable facing Henry Street, two interesting turrets at one corner of the house, fish-scale shingles, and a rear section, perhaps an addition, with a mansard roof and a porch with intact arch details. The facades are a hodge-podge of boarded up windows, exposed windows, and windowless frames. The Burger-Matthews House is certainly one of the most visually spectacular abandoned houses in the Hudson Valley. Perhaps I’ll get a few more photos of it in its current condition, but I wish TransArt all the best in restoring the house. It’s the kind of place that easily could have burned or been demolished by now, and surely it has been considered by some to be an eyesore and a hazard. But this slideshow of the house shows that it has a lot of integrity and detail worthy of preservation, and that it should be brought forth as a beacon of changing fortunes in Kingston.

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On the flip side, school boards are at it again. A few months after the Yorktown Central School District demolished the Strang-Melbourne House, the Rye Neck School District plans to demolish the Gedney farmhouse, built in 1790. The school board will schedule the demolition of the home at a meeting on December 7. The house is located on Boston Post Road at North Barry Avenue in Mamaroneck.

It seems to be the start of a trend whereby perfectly usable buildings are vacated, left to sit empty for some time, and then deemed too expensive to rehabilitate, when they shouldn’t have been vacated in the first place.

2 Responses to Burger-Matthews House, Kingston

Hey Rob. In the slideshow there’s an interior picture of a chimney with a curve. Is that supposed to be like that, or did it happen over time? It looks crazy. The white chimney on the other side also has a funny angle. Awesome house.